This film – a box-office bomb whose ticket sales recovered just 21 percent of its budget – was the first from the short-lived Gladden Entertainment.

The United States government provides him a laboratory located in Ithaca, New York, masked as a medical company.

John moves to Ithaca and meets real estate agent Elizabeth Stephens while searching for an apartment.

He attempts to win the affections of the single mother by inviting her teenage son Paul to take a tour of the lab.

John is confident in the lab's cover story but Paul, an unusually gifted student with a passion for science, becomes suspicious when he discovers a statistically impossible patch of five-leaf clover on the grounds.

Paul and his aspiring journalist girlfriend, Jenny Anderman, decide to expose the weapons factory to the media, stealing a container of plutonium as evidence.

After convincing his mother and his school that his project is about hamsters bred in darkness, he begins research and construction of the bomb.

Suspecting him of terrorist intent, the investigators search Paul's home and discover that he and Jenny have left for the science fair.

Paul suggests taking the bomb to a quarry outside of town, but John admits that he had not fully understood the ramifications of his plutonium refining process.

John refuses to cooperate and opens the door to the lab, revealing a large crowd, including Jenny and the press.

You read through the books and these guys are really creepy: scary and fascinating, and very brilliant and very elitist and very condescending to the rest of the world.

[3] The plot was likely influenced by the case of John Aristotle Phillips, a Princeton University undergraduate, who came to prominence in 1977 as the "A-Bomb Kid" for designing a nuclear weapon in a term paper using publicly available books and articles.

He asked the scientist why he did, and he said "Well, you're sitting in your office and if it works, then you're creating temperatures and pressures that existed only during the creation of the universe.

Ferren used literally tons of technical gear purchased surplus from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and performed most of the visual effects work, including robotics, live on set.

[11] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 61 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

He particularly took note of how "sophisticated" the film was about the relationship between Paul Stephens and John Matthewson, while praising Brickman's ability to "combines everyday personality conflicts with a funny, oddball style of seeing things, and wrap up the whole package into a tense and effective thriller.

"[13] Brickman received the President's Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for The Manhattan Project.